The capacity of artificial intelligence is not overrated, it is real, going by the increasing number of businesses that have deployed the use of AI to improve productivity.
According to a report, 61% of firms use AI to optimize emails while at least 55% use the same tool for personalized services.
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Additionally, a Forbes Advisor survey reveals that 73% of businesses are already using or planning to use AI-powered chatbots for instant messaging.
The use of AI is not limited to email optimization, it is used in other aspects of business. That’s what this article will address and we’ll discuss the ways AI is used to boost productivity.
What is AI?
AI means Artificial Intelligence, nearly every business owner or entrepreneur who follows the tech trend knows this. To some people, AI means automating a process or just deploying machine learning to do what human beings originally do.
What AI does is beyond just task automation, it refers to the ability of machines to learn and make decisions based on human instructions.
The instructions could be based on prompts, data and analysis fed into it. With its invention, AI has become part of human existence.
Data-backed report on the popularity of AI among businesses
Companies that have recently embraced Artificial Intelligence didn’t do so because their competitors are doing so, but because they know the benefits of AI to their businesses and be on top of their game.
In doing this, they know data plays a key role in making informed decisions, so, they use AI to collect data. And of course, McKinsey’s survey and Grand View Research support this assertion.
In the case of Grand View Research, the global AI market is expected to grow by 40.2% between 2021 and 2028.
As for McKinsey’s survey in 2021, 56% of respondents say they are adopting AI as against 50% in 2020.
There are other businesses that believe that deploying AI will help them in boosting business growth.
Impact of AI on business
Businesses are making commendable gains from the use of AI, noticeable benefits of AI to business include:
- Simplifying business operations through automation
- Ensuring efficiency
- Minimize human error
- Makes monitoring easy
- Improves customer service support
- Makes business expansion possible
Ways AI is Used to boost productivity
As we publish, research is ongoing by tech giants on more other ways Artificial Intelligence can be deployed to help reduce stress in business activities. However, here are the ways businesses use AI to improve performance:
Gathering actionable customer-driven data
Businesses use AI to gather data from customers to know how their brands or products are being perceived.
They don’t do this for fun, but rather to gain insights on ways to improve, discover new opportunities for expansion, and areas they can consolidate.
Streamlining customer support
Customer support is one of the areas AI is popular. Apart from being greeted by chatbots on the company’s website where AI-powered chatbots could ask you, “How may I help you today?”, this has also been deployed to messaging apps and social media.
From a management perspective, the use of chatbots frees up customer support staff to attend to more technical issues of their customers that AI might be conversant with. In our earliest post, we mentioned how AI is improving customer support.
By combining natural language processing, machine learning and AI, businesses are able to understand customer requests.
The best part is that AI-powered chatbots are trained to know if you’re satisfied with their answers or not and connect you to a human-support staff for more personalized issues.
Detect fraud
Identifying fraud is one of the common goals of companies that provide financial services.
Banking institutions use machine learning algorithms to flag suspicious transactions like withdrawals and deposits.
For instance, a 15-year-old bank account that has never accumulated up to $100,000 suddenly received $500 million is most likely to be blocked by AI and send an alert to the appropriate authority for scrutiny.
Even when an account is witnessing a never-before volume of withdrawals, AI could flag it and compel the owner to undergo another set of verification processes. This may be extremely impossible for bank staff to manually monitor thousands of transactions that are implemented every second and be able to monitor them at the same time.
These are some of the ways Artificial Intelligence is used for identifying and preventing fraud in the financial sector.
Creating targeted campaigns
Marketing/advertising units of multinationals use AI to create targeted campaigns to get in front of the right audience at the right time.
For instance, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Twitter Ads make it easy for advertisers to choose their target market and region for their marketing efforts to bring the desired result and to ensure that resources are not wasted.
How customers react to advertisements is very important to marketing campaigns.
Helping logistics for fast delivery
For haulage companies, AI has been deployed to help delivery drivers find faster routes.
Faster delivery doesn’t only lead to customer satisfaction, but also safe cost for companies in the long run and increases the volume of deliverables per week.
DHL, a global logistics company that uses AI to improve its business productivity.
Improving sales
E-commerce platforms like Amazon, Taobao, eBay, Wish, Worldwide brands, and DealExtreme among others use AI tools to make recommendations of products to their online users.
Wrapping up:
The aforementioned ways businesses use AI to improve productivity will not only help businesses to expand but also help to tap into other areas where there are opportunities.